iPhone 4S users facing performance issues with iOS 8 upgrade?

If you downloaded iOS 8 following its release yesterday, then you may have hit glitches with certain apps, and experienced some slowdowns if you have an older device.

While the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 are compatible with iOS 8, these are the oldest iDevices Apple lists as such – and as is usually the case on the fringe of compatibility, the new operating system doesn't run quite as slickly as it should on these pieces of hardware.

A number of apps don't work properly with iOS 8 on these older devices. We already heard about the issues with the Dropbox app yesterday, and HealthKit (new with iOS 8) is also problematic by all accounts. Some apps are taking up to 50 per cent longer to load, too.

The overall experience on the iPhone 4S has been highlighted as somewhat sluggish, with Ars Technica pointing out that the outdated hardware in the 4S (compared to the 5S, let alone the iPhone 6) just doesn't have to muscle to run the new operating system smoothly, with animations being a little choppy.

Not only that, but the 3.5in screen size doesn't fit so well with iOS 8, given that the upgrade was designed with the bigger-screened new iPhones in mind, with the small screen making things feel rather claustrophobic.

All this has seen many folks wheeling out an old chestnut, namely that Apple likes to hamper older devices with borderline-viable OS upgrades to ensure folks are wanting to upgrade their handsets.

However, while Ars seems to deliver some apparently nasty barbs here, the site does note that iOS 8 on the 4S isn't as slow as iOS 7 was on the iPhone 4 – and that despite performance hiccups, most folks will still want to upgrade to iOS 8 on the 4S due to the extra features offered. Evidently any sluggishness isn't that bad...

Furthermore, reader comments (and general chatter elsewhere on the net) seem to suggest that performance isn't actually that much of an issue on the 4S.